Back in the day when people sent out letters, they would pay close attention to the contents of their message and they made sure to put on the correct addresses of the sender and the receiver because you wouldn’t want it to get lost.

In the modern age, when letters are sent with one click of a button and because of the amount of them we send, mistakes are bound to happen and after this woman received an email she wasn’t supposed to that included sensitive information, she didn’t know what to do.

More info: TikTok

A woman received a job description which contained notes on job candidates that she considered mean, which made her think to contact the applicants

Image credits: Judit Peter (not the actual photo)

“I’m going to have a little storytime”

“And talk through the comments on the application, which I can’t share, to kind of still figure out whether I should reach out to people, because they will want to know, obviously, what this document says about them. Some information and some of the comments are just mean.

The first candidate on the document, I actually knew them, I used to work with them. I know that because I have their first name as well as two of the companies’, which has made it easy for me to track them down. So that is one person on there.

The next person it goes through, we have information about their personality, that they’re very smiley, that, you know, they come across quite motivated and fun, which is nice.

It goes on for a couple of the candidates to talk about how they don’t really get the role, which I don’t think is really an indicator on the person and how they interview. It’s more of a case of how, I guess, that candidate has sort of described that role. But anyway, that’s not that important.

We have one person who actually had a really good experience. And because I found them on LinkedIn, I know that on paper, it sounds like they’ll be a good fit, but they have been described as ‘lacking energy’, which is not really nice. But um, you know, that’s probably how they come across.”

Image credits: @melchantl

Image credits: @melchantl

“We have the next person that, I don’t know, I think the recruiter potentially likes”

“There’s a lot of data on here, a lot of information. But the stuff that is not great, that would be really hard to sort of have to read as your experience interviewing for this role would be ‘lacks a bit of energy, quite boring,’ as well as, which I just hate this comment, is described as ‘very Made In Chelsea’ and ‘monotone.’

Which, like, why would you write that? Why would you write that to pass that information on to the hiring manager? It’s just not, it’s just not relevant. It’s just not the right sort of way to talk about a candidate and you know, having to read that about yourself. Yeah, it’s something I’m not really excited about letting this person know about.

Next person has their first name and their company. That’s why I tracked them down very easily. And last person as well, it pretty much describes what they did, their name as well, so I can track them down.

So, easy enough to find these people, but just feel bad having to send this to them. But essentially, I guess it’s up to them, how they want to proceed, how they want to interact with the recruiter, because the recruiter is not just from a recruitment agency. They are from the company. It’s the HR team. So this does reflect on this company.

But anyway, I’m wondering if this sways your opinions, or whether I should still go to these candidates and send this out to them, essentially.”

Image credits: @melchantl

The woman in the video is Mel Sutcliffe and she is a London-based Aussie creating blog posts about lifestyle, food and traveling. There isn’t a lot of content on her TikTok but the video she posted not too long ago now has 2.4 million views.

It was in this video that Mel revealed that she received an email from a company with a job description that also included notes about candidates. She was torn between warning the candidates about the notes and keeping it to herself as she tracked them down quite easily and would be able to contact them.

People were really curious to know what those notes said, so that is why she posted the second video, but it didn’t receive as much traction as the first one.

It is probably because people were expecting the comments to be more harsh and completely irrelevant to work. Because they imagined the notes to be more offensive, at first they thought that the candidates needed to know what they were getting into if they planned on accepting an offer.

But people’s imaginations were more dramatic than reality and when they heard the comments that were on the email, they were surprised that they were so tame and actually saw most of them as legitimate feedback. So they changed the tune and advised Mel to let it go.

The woman listened to the viewers and realized that it was not worth bothering the candidates, especially because many professionals assured Mel that the comments mostly weren’t inappropriate. Though she did inform the recruiters of the email she received.

@melchantl The moment when I realised that I knew one of them on there 🤦🏻‍♀️ #corporate #events #business #corporateevents #marketing #digitalmarketing #fyp #9to5 #business #branding #digitalmarketing #marketingdigital #socialmedia ♬ original sound – Melchantl

But it’s not that uncommon to receive an email that was not meant for you. Tessian conducts research into human errors in businesses and one of their surveys found that 58 percent of employees they surveyed had sent an email to the wrong person and 17 percent of those people sent an email outside of their organization.

Preava says that it happens because the sender will make a mistake in the email address, choose the wrong autocomplete option or overlook some of them when selecting a lot of recipients. And you only notice it when someone else notices it and does something about it.

However, Egress says that when you get an email containing confidential information from outside your own organization or a stranger, “it’s important to use your common sense. If the email is a marketing message or spam, you should simply unsubscribe, delete it, and move on. However, if it is a business email that was intended for someone else, it’s important to take the right steps.”

The right step, according to Egress is “to promptly email the sender directly and let them know about their mistake as if confidential information has been inadvertently shared, it could lead to a data breach. This will help them become aware of the error and take corrective action. You also should permanently delete the email.”

Also, because it’s confidential information, it most likely means that someone accidentally caused a data breach, so you might want to let the sender know about it. That means they are aware of the mistake and can react accordingly and it means that you won’t be getting more similar emails from them.

It happens to the best of us, so although Mel’s situation is not that unique, she considered the information in the email to be unprofessional and inappropriate; that’s why she was unsure about how to react to it.

What would have been your reaction after reading a letter with such comments about candidates? Do you think they were normal feedback or were they unnecessary? How would you feel if you found out that a recruiter described you like they did the candidates in the email? Let us know in the comments.

When TikTok users saw the first video in which Mel talked about receiving an email with comments on candidates, they encouraged her to contact them

But after seeing the video in which the woman shared the comments, they were underwhelmed and considered most of them legitimate feedback

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